Bound in modern boards. With a woodcut title border. A good copy with a few early marginal annotations and a few stains.

FOURTH EDITION. A very early edition of this collection of similitudes, comparisons, allusions, metaphors and allegories for scholarly use. The first edition was also printed by Schürer, in December 1514 in a quarto that included the "De Copia". Schürer was a dedicated printer of works by Erasmus. He printed sixty editions in ten years (1509-1519). The "Parabolae" was the only work that he printed in its first edition.

"On the genesis of the 'Parabolae' we learn much from the prefatory letter in which the work is dedicated to Erasmus' dear friend, Pieter Gillis. It was a by-product of the work Erasmus put into the 1515 revision of the 'Adagia' and into the collected works of Seneca (1515). For the 'Adagia' he was collecting only proverbs and words or phrases having a quasi-proverbial currency; but ancient moralists like Plutarch and Seneca contain much wisdom in the form, not of proverbs, but of aphorisms, illustrated by comparison with some fact drawn from history, from our experience of life, or from the world of nature. And beside these authors in whom the moral is already drawn, recorders of natural and social phenomena such as Aristotle and the Elder Pliny provided a great store of facts from which a compiler could draw his own morals; and it soon became almost second-nature in Erasmus to collect these too. It is this element of comparison, this parallelism, that is the mark of the 'Parabolae', and Erasmus at first refers to his collection as 'Similia', that is, 'Parallels' (in Greek homoioseis.) It was all potentially material for the man who wished to learn from the ancients to live wisely, but also to think clearly and to write compellingly." (R.A.B. Mynors' introductory note to the "Parabolae" in the "Collected Works of Erasmus", Vol. 23, p. 124)